Tag: Documentary

2023, Movies

Money Shot: The Pornhub Story (2023, Suzanne Hillinger)

This documentary isn’t so much the story of Pornhub as its the story of Pornhub from “Traffickinghub” to the present. It’s a reasonably balanced look at internet pornography in the 2020s, and, specifically, the biggest company in internet pornography, that I wish was a little broader in its scope.

2021, Movies

Django & Django (2021, Luca Rea)

This is a brief documentary about the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Corbucci that really feels like it was meant to be a DVD extra or something. I haven’t gotten around to seeing any of Corbucci’s films yet, so watching it might have been an odd choice. But I watched it because Quentin Tarantino was in …

2016, Movies

Hired Gun (2016, Fran Strine)

This is one of those documentaries that tries to cover a big topic by just interviewing some people and telling their stories. There are a whole series of these and they’re not the most effective. But this one is reasonably entertaining, and has enough stories that it isn’t a waste of time.

1974, Movies, TV

Edvard Munch (1974, Peter Watkins)

This film was actually a Norwegian TV series that was slightly abridged for a theatrical release in the rest of the world. (Unfortunately I watched the abridged version.) It’s a typical Peter Watkins approach to a documentary about a historical subject – filmed as if the film crew had travelled into the past.

2006, TV

When the Levees Broke (2006)

This is a detail and devastating miniseries about Hurricane Katrina and what happened in New Orleans that I have been meaning to watch for a decade and a half. It is essential viewing, even all these years later. (I might say especially all these years later given how many more serious hurricanes have hit the …

1987, Movies

Yuki yukite, shingun aka The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987, Kazuo Hara)

This is a bonkers documentary about one man’s quest to expose the truth about what happened to two Japanese soldiers in his regiment in New Guinea at the end of WWII. I can honestly say I’ve seen few films like it. I also think it’s a bit of a landmark as, though this type of …

2022, Movies

The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival

This was my first time attending TIFF in person in 3 years. It was a little exhausting, given how far out of downtown we now live but, once I got the hang of it, I fell back into the rhythm of it and thoroughly enjoyed myself. It also helped that, after a few movies that …

2015, Podcasts

Undisclosed (2015)

Undisclosed ended in March. I found out more recently because I’m perpetually behind in my podcast listening. It’s kind of hard to sum up this podcast, because there are so many cases and I cannot remember all of them over the last seven years, but I wanted to mention something about them for the simple …

2022, Movies

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022, Laura Poitras)

This film tells the story of the (formerly controversial) photographer Nan Goldin through the lens of her crusade to convince the major art galleries of the world to stop receiving money from the Sacklers (the former owners of Purdue Pharma) and to remove the Sackler name from their institutions.

2022, Movies

Free Money (2022, Lauren DeFilippo, Sam Soko)

This is a brief but reasonably compelling and entertaining documentary about a UBI experiment in Kenya by the charity GiveDirectly. Full disclosure: I have complete drunk the Universal Basic Income Kool-Aid so I am not going to be the most critical reviewer of anything about UBI. You have been warned.

2018, Movies

They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead (2018, Morgan Neville)

This is a super arty, slightly hagiographic documentary about The Other Side of the Wind, a film Orson Welles never released but apparently completed. If I knew, I had forgotten that the film was released with this documentary. (I have not yet watched the movie.)

2022, Movies, Sports

Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist (2022, Ryan Duffy, Tony Vainuku)

All I remember of Manti Te’o was that his girlfriend didn’t exist and he was probably involved somehow. Watching this, that makes me sad. I feel so bad for this man, not just for what this other person did to him, but because of what we as a society did to him, for seemingly no …

Movies

Jennifer Lopez: Halftime (2022, Amanda Micheli)

This is an official but rather insightful look at Jennifer Lopez as she tries to put on the Super Bowl Halftime Show while worrying about whether or not she’s going to get nominated for her first Oscar. All at the age of 50.

2022, Movies

White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie and Fitch (2022, Alison Klayman)

I know very littles of Abercrombie and Fitch. For all I know, my first introduction to them might have been that “Summer Girls” song. More likely it was one of their ads, but I wouldn’t have known it at the time. Anyway, this was all news to be. But, for someone who didn’t know anything …

2021, Movies

Vince Carter: Legacy (2021, Justin C. Polk)

Vince Carter is not why I’m a basketball fan, that’s Steve Nash. But Vince Carter is why I paid enough attention to basketball to discover Steve Nash. And, of course, I was a pretty impressionable age when Vinsanity was happening. So I have a soft spot for him and for his story. (I am the …

2020, Movies

Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles (2020, Laura Gabbert)

This is a weird one. The film mentions Yotam Ottolenghi in its title, and the film focuses on him as its main character, and yet he is not one of the chefs baking cakes for the gala at the centre of the film. Seriously.

1970, Movies

Original Cast Album: Company (1970, D.A. Pennebaker)

This brief documentary about the creation of the original cast album for the musical Company is so brief because it was supposed to be a TV pilot. The idea was to have a TV series based around recordings of cast albums. I’m not sure there would have been enough, but it’s kind of a neat …

2021, TV

Muhammad Ali (2021)

Burns and Co’s second documentary series focused entirely on one person is even longer than and more in-depth than Hemingway. But, fortunately, Ali’s life is, in many ways, a grander subject. At least for the first half, the series is in many ways an alternate history of the post war United States. And even when …

1991, Movies

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991, Fax Bahr, George Hickenlooper, Eleanor Coppola)

Having seen Apocalypse Now many times – including Redux, which I maintain is better – I have finally got around to watching the documentary about the infamous shoot. At this point I have seen hundreds if not thousands of documentaries and most of them were made since this one. And I will say that your …

2004, Movies

Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (2004, Joe Berlinger, Bruce Sinofsky)

I’ve been meaning to watch this movie for a decade and a half. Watching Get Back spurned Jenn to insist we watch it and I’m glad she did. But I do wonder if taking so long to watch the movie dulled it a bit for me – what was distinct and unique in 2004 is …

2019, Movies

I Am Not Alone (2019, directed by Garin Hovannisian)

This is a surprisingly slick documentary about the 2018 Armenian Revolution. We need a different word for non-fiction films like this, though because calling it a documentary implies a level of impartiality that is not present in this film. Nevertheless, it’s a “ground truth” view of the protests and it manages to get some interviews …

2018, Movies

Invisible Essence: The Little Prince (2018, Charles Officer)

My father read The Little Prince to me as a child, and maybe I read it myself a few times too. It’s been a very long time. But this whimsical and ambitious documentary does a fairly good job of showing me why it’s such a popular children’s book. I’m not sure it overcomes its nature …

1969, 1970, Movies

Woodstock (1970, Michael Wadleigh)

Note: I am reviewing the director’s cut, not the much shorter theatrical version. So, I’ve seen the majority of the musical performances in this film multiple times, and some of them many times. (Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” in particular, but also the CSN performance and some others.) I’ve seen them because Woodstock used to be …

2011, Movies

How to Die in Oregon (2011, Peter Richardson)

This is not a particularly interesting film as a film, it’s a pretty typical documentary in terms of form and style. But it’s subject matter is extremely vital – looking at the lives and decisions of terminally ill people who are trying to decide whether or not to end their lives legally in Oregon. (With …

2021, Movies

Schumacher (2021, Hanns-Bruno Kammertöns, Vanessa Nöcker, Michael Wech)

This is an extremely workmanlike documentary about the first part of the career of Michael Schumacher and a tiny little bit about the accident. Much like the Jacques Cousteau documentary I just watched, it feels sanitized but in this case even more so. It also feels incomplete.